


your house is waiting for you to walk in

by busaikko



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Growing Up, Hawaii, Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-22
Updated: 2011-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-15 20:54:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busaikko/pseuds/busaikko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grace grows up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your house is waiting for you to walk in

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Bruce Springsteen's "You're Missing".

Auntie Kono came by a few weeks after and talked to Grace's mom for a bit. Mom didn't invite her in for coffee, just kept her on the front steps like she was selling something. Grace knew Auntie Kono saw her because she gave Grace a fast little smile, but she didn't say hi or anything.

After Auntie Kono left, Grace's mom didn't talk about her visit. Grace was getting used to these silences.

A few months later, Uncle Chin Ho came to Grace's school on Traffic Safety Day, along with Officer Safety Cat, which was just someone in a cat costume with a giant head. All the kids in grades four to six listened to the talk in the gym and then practiced traffic safety outside. When they finished and trooped back indoors, Officer Safety Cat took out her ukulele and started teaching a song about, duh, being safe. Uncle Chin Ho spoke to Grace's teacher, who touched her mouth with two fingers the way she did to keep from crying and then let him take her out into the corridor. He dropped into a squat and looked up at her.

"How you doing?" he asked. Grace shrugged. Uncle Chin Ho nodded like she'd said something important. "We miss you a hell of a lot," he said. "We promised your dad we'd take care of you. Me and Kono, we talk to your mother pretty much every week. If there's ever anything you need...."

"I want you to take me to see my dad," Grace said.

Uncle Chin Ho smiled in a sad way. "Your mother will probably want to be with you, babe."

Grace shrugged again. "She wouldn't let Auntie Kono talk to me," she explained, to show that she understood.

"We love you," Uncle Chin Ho said, and stood up. "Don't forget that, okay?"

"Mm, hm," Grace said, and slipped back inside.

She didn't tell her mother that she'd talked to him, and she didn't ask her mother to take her to the cemetery. They went anyway on her dad's birthday and on Father's Day. The _kī_ planted by the graveside was taller every time.

When Grace turned sixteen, Stan gave her a new low-en car and her mother let her visit her grandparents in New Jersey for two weeks of summer vacation. The East Coast heat was overwhelming and the dirty air burned her throat, and every time she looked at something or touched something in her grandparents' house she was told a story about her father. The last time she'd seen her dad she'd still been playing with Barbies. He'd said _Danno loves you_ and kissed her on the forehead before she went up into Stan's house, and _Danno loves you_ on the phone before bedtime the next day, and then the day after that he was dead. She didn't tell her grandparents that.

She had a week left of summer vacation when she returned to the wonderful coolness of Honolulu. She did a lot of driving; she was a safe driver. She went to the cemetery and told her dad all about Grandma's bowling team and working on Granddaddy's Chevy in the still, stifling heat of the garage, Cousin Mel cursing the Red Sox like a mantra. She found some new beaches and ate cheap Korean barbeque and looked up Kono at police headquarters.

Kono hadn't changed much over the years. Her hair was shorter, and she wore a suit and heels and blue eyeshadow. She told Grace she had to be in court but they should meet up at the shave ice place later. Grace said sure.

Kono showed up in jeans and gave Grace a big hug before ordering. "You look so grown-up," she said, waving at Grace with the back of her hand when they sat down. She pushed her chair back on two legs, rocking it a little with the foot she kept planted on the ground. "Me and Chin, we've kind of been keeping track of you. We respect your mother's wishes to keep you out of -- " she circled her hand in the air and rolled her eyes -- "you know. But your dad was important to us, and you were the most important thing to him." She nodded with a bit of a shrug and ate a big spoonful of her strawberry ice.

Grace asked for Kono to tell her everything. It took hours; they ended up walking way down the beach and watching the sun set. Grace learned that Chin Ho had two kids now, a boy and a girl. She was happy for him, of course she was, even though she felt a little betrayed, on her part, on her father's part. Kono probably detected this, because she changed the subject and told Grace about her girlfriend and the house they were fixing up and their dogs.

"She's more butch than me," Kono said, shaking her head as if in exaggerated sadness, "but boy does she love her chihuahuas. You should come over," she added. "When the kitchen is finished and we're not eating takeout every night."

"Okay," Grace said. Kono threw an arm around Grace's shoulder and squeezed her close. "My mom... she just wants to protect me," Grace said, awkward and apologetic.

"We know that," Kono said, quickly. "If you were my kid I'd do the same. She loves you, baby, she wants you safe."

"My dad used to call me monkey," Grace said, remembering.

Kono grinned. "I wasn't going to say anything, but... it's your face, you know. Probably genetic."

"Hey," Grace protested, and tried to trip Kono up, but they were both laughing too hard for her ninja move to work. On the way back to the parking lot, Kono taught her how to really take someone down.

"There's no such thing as dirty moves," Kono said. "Do what you have to." She sounded self-consciously intense, as if this was important.

Grace turned eighteen and got accepted to the University of Hawaii. She went out to dinner with her mom and Stan and Kono and Chin Ho to celebrate. They talked about surfing and Chin's kids and Kono's dogs and nothing important. It felt good. Peaceful. Grace knew her dad would have approved.

She asked Chin Ho to take her to go see Steve a few weeks later. She could have gone on her own, but she didn't want to. Part of her was still the scared little girl learning her father was dead, and Chin Ho understood that.

She didn't stand up when Steve entered the interview room, but he walked right over to her as if pulled by gravity, or magnetism, or some other great invisible power. He sat down, and she looked at him. He was older than she remembered, grey in his hair and lines framing his eyes, but still big, muscular, tough, dangerous.

"Hi," she said, and tried a smile, but it slipped away like a wave from the shore.

"Hi, Grace," Steve said. He sat alert and still like he was waiting. Like he'd been waiting a long time. "You look... you look a lot like your father."

"Short?" she asked, and that got her a glint of his eyes that might have been humor. "Kono says I have a monkey face."

"It's the ears more than the face," Steve deadpanned, and then winced. "Thank you for coming," he added formally, and clasped his hands together on the dirty counter in front of the scratched window between them.

"I don't blame you," Grace said, the words coming out fast and hard and graceless. "I don't."

Steve bit his lip, looked at her, and nodded once, slowly. "That means a lot to me."

Grace thought about what Chin Ho said, that Steve couldn't forgive himself, that maybe being unforgiven was something he held on to because it was all he had left. Her mother did the same thing with anger, and Grace had been reluctant to step out of her sadness for the longest time.

Steve didn't ask questions, but Grace told him about going to university and surfing with Kono and the part-time job Stan had arranged for her for the summer. It felt awkward and weird. She didn't really know why she was here, after all.

"Danny would be proud of you," Steve said. He looked sincere, in a devastated kind of way.

"Anyway," Grace said, and got up, nearly tripping over the chair as it dragged on the concrete floor. "Chin Ho's here too," and she saw him already getting up from where he'd been pretending to be interested in a battered Reader's Digest. "I'll, you know, be seeing you." She backed up and around Chin Ho and walked out past the guards in a slow smooth glide. Only outside where the sun hit her face did she let herself stumble to sit down on the steps. She was crying, and she didn't know when she'd started. She wanted to be angry, but looking up she saw the soft blue sky rising up from where it was tangled in the razor wire, rising all the way up to heaven.

She got tissues out of her bag and wiped her face off and blew her nose, and she was leaning against the car door when Chin Ho came out, his shoulders tight.

"It's a hard thing," Chin Ho said. "But you're strong. He said to tell you thank you for coming. You don't," Chin Ho added, "have to come again. He, we wouldn't, it's not necessary."

"I know," Grace said. "Can we not talk about it?"

"Sure," Chin Ho said, and got in the driver's seat of his battered minivan while she buckled into the passenger's side. There were Dora the Explorer stickers all over the airbag compartment, and Grace smiled, tracing one.

"I guess you won't be babysitting anymore, huh, college girl," Chin Ho said a few miles down the road, watching her out of the corners of his eyes. "I'm supposed to invite you over for Sunday brunch, by the way."

"I'll bring a salad," Grace said. She was bad at making stuff but hated to ask the cook to make it for her, so she always brought salads. "Kono coming?"

"It's free food," Chin Ho said darkly. Grace laughed, a little too loud, and caught herself, and fiddled with the CD player. Something Korean and pop came on, and Grace turned it up.

"Can we stop by the cemetery?" Grace asked. "If you have time."

"Sure," Chin Ho said. "No problem."

He stayed in the car when they got there; it was already nearly five, and Grace figured he needed to be getting home.

Hardly anyone was there, which was nice. Grace walked up and stopped by the grave and said, "Hello, Danno, it's Gracie." The _kī_ was as tall as she was, by now, leaves moving slow in the sea breeze. She didn't know how to say everything else, so she took a moment, looking towards the break in the hills where the sea glittered like diamonds in the lowering sun. She wanted to say that she'd seen Steve, that he was fine, her mother was fine, she was fine, that they were all fine, that he didn't need to worry. What she did say, in the end, was, "I really miss you," selfish but true. She swallowed and bent down to rub her hand over her father's name, like she always did. "Love you," she said. She took a breath, stood up and stretched her arms to the sky, and then went back to the car, and her home, and her life.


End file.
